As bestselling reporter Sebastian Junger's account of his year spent with US forces in Afghanistan joins other first-rate books about contemporary conflicts, novelist Geoff Dyer argues that recent reportage trumps fiction in its characterisation, observation and narrative drive

There's been no shortage of films and TV dramas depicting the horror of the 'war on terror' - with varying degrees of success. Generation Kill, which debuts in the UK in the new year, promises to tell it like it is